Burmeister was a critic of Darwinism, he rejected common descent.[6] However, he changed his views slightly on common descent in the late 1870s. In 1879 he commented that:

I am wholly convinced that the beings found in the older formations of our globe are the prototypes of contemporary beings, and in this respect, I declare myself a partisan of the hypothesis recently developed in detail, and as a natural law, by Darwin and his followers. But I must confess that their experiments have not provided me with any proof that any fundamental change in type is possible.[6]